[Qemu-devel] Assigning an eth port to a guest VM

[Yehuda Yitschak <yehuday@marvell.com>]

Hello 

I would to ask your advice on how to assign a semi-virtualized Ethernet port to a guest VM

The eth port's HW partially supports virtualization since the data path MMIO registers (which controls rx/tx operation) are duplicated per VM.
So for the run-time operation the guest can directly access the MMIO registers, using VFIO-PLATFORM, and enjoy the performance benefit.

However for the initial setup and occasional configuration the guest need to access control path registers which are shared for all guests.
AFAIK this is usually done with HW emulation using trap & emulate with QEMU. 
So, to the best of my knowledge I need a mix of VFIO and HW emulation to get the port to work with device assignment , right ?

Are there any standard methods for achieving this ?
Is there an example for such an existing HW in QEMU ?

Thanks 

Yehuda Yitschak